Book reviews

Bill Easterly’s new book “The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor” is a meandering mélange of anecdotes, parts of Why Nations Fail, and miscellaneous pages from human rights reports, sprinkled with history of economic thought, non sequiturs about one block in New York, finally mixed with some sharper critiques of Thomas Friedman and discussion of the difficulties of measuring the relationship between autocracy and growth.

Alan Gerber and Don Green, political scientists at Yale and Columbia respectively, and authors of a large number of voting experiments, have a new textbook out titled Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation. This is noteworthy because despite the massive growth in field experiments, to date there hasn’t been an accessible and modern textbook for social scientists looking to work in, or better understand, this area. The new book is very good, and I definitely recommend anyone working in this area to read at least key chapters.

The new book Uncontrolled by Jim Manzi has attracted a lot of recent press (e.g. see Markus’ recent post for discussion of David Brooks’ take, or this piece in the Atlantic), and makes the argument that there should be a lot more randomized experiments of social programs. I was therefore very interested to order a copy and just finished reading it.